Outskirts of Shrewd'm / Travel Wanderer
No. of Recommendations: 2
"Wherever you go - there you are"
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
Jeff
No. of Recommendations: 2
"Wherever you go - there you are"
Should be followed by the importance to look around, understand the differences and enjoy, rather than complaining that the places you travel to should be more like home.
IP,
who has apologized more than once to a local, in their language, for the behavior of an Ugly American
No. of Recommendations: 1
Should be followed by the importance to look around, understand the differences and enjoy, rather than complaining that the places you travel to should be more like home.
I've only ever seen one stereotypical "ugly American". It was a stocky older woman in the lobby of a hotel in Japan. She was complaining about everything, from what I could tell. I don't remember her complaints specifically now, but she certainly wasn't happy with the food (we were actually in the dining room for breakfast).
If I can help a fellow traveler, I often will (offer advice or suggestions). I quickly determined that she was worthy of being ignored, and that's what I did. Just tuned her out, thinking "she just doesn't get it". I would say people like that should probably burn their passports and stay home, but at the same time it's people like that who need to experience different cultures and living standards. Something of a conundrum.
Most of the Americans I see overseas these days are grinning monkeys pointing cellphones at themselves (and nothing else...they don't capture what they're seeing, they just pose in front of it).
No. of Recommendations: 11
My two "favorite" Ugly American" stories (well four if you count my contributions):
1) Back during the 1970's we were in Paris watching a couple of middle aged Americans. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, sandals with white socks, a bucket hat and had a camera around his neck. She was doing the screaming as she held up a fist full of US dollars; yelling at a French taxi driver whose car they had just let "But this is REAL money".
2) During the mid-1980's when all things were possible for the Japanese, a major Japanese electronics company was kind enough to take us as one of their 25 biggest resellers on an all-expenses paid, top-shelf 10-day tour of Japan. While taking the Shinkansen (bullet-train) from Tokyo to Kyoto, some of the American guys apparently had too much to drink and started rolling beer bottles noisily down the length of the carriage. There is no describing how embarrassed I was - especially considering the fact that Japanese take this sort of behaviors socially appalling.
A few days earlier, I had committed by own faux pas. We were taken to a geisha show and, at the bar, before the show, our hosts asked what we would like to drink. For no reason that I have ever figured out, while there are a number of very good Japanese beers and the bar was stocked with a broad variety of Western booze, I ordered a Guinness stout. Everyone got their drink except me and I decided to say nothing and watch everyone else take their sips. About ten minutes later, a waiter, accompanied by the club's owner, brought me a bottle of Guinness on a silver tray. Apparently, I had ordered something they didn't have in stock. Rather than have my hosts lose face by telling me that, they had found a bottle somewhere at some other bar and brought it to me. I now had to both show my appreciation for the wonderful elixir, yet not drink all of it - which would have forced my hosts to buy me another bottle of what must have been the world's most expensive beer.
About a decade later I visited the same firm in Tokyo and three of their executives took my wife and I to a hotel restaurant for lunch. Accompanying one of the fish dishes, the restaurant served lemon wedges in small clamps with perforations for the juice to run out. A said I hadn't seen that gadget befor3e and said it was "clever". They wanted to buy them from the hotel and present them to me and I objected strenuously (as I figured the hotel would take advantage of them and charge an arm and a leg to sell their "silverware:. Anyway after a while, I prevailed. Later that day, my wife and I dropped into Takashimaya department store and bought half a dozen of them for about a buck each. Three months later, I was at my office desk when a FedEx envelope showed up with a Boston hotel as the return address. Inside was a hotel shoe-shine mitt holding six lemon squeezers. I guess the executive waited until the next time he visited their near-Boston American headquarters and took the opportunity to save face for the company. We now have a matched set of 12 lemon squeezers (which I can't remember ever using).
Jeff
No. of Recommendations: 2
Jeff, those are sweet and understandable "faux pas" of yours that show only that you paid attention to the differences in culture, appreciated and learned from it.
The "real dollar" story is one I remember quite well. We were at a restaurant in Portugal, having once again an amazing meal. Though we didn't speak Portuguese, our server was fluent in French, which my foreign language education professional parents handled fluently and I was proficient in. All of a sudden, we hear from another table "Why can't you use REAL money!," from a little old blue haired woman travelling solo. Since she was clearly distressed, and our server spoke no English, Dad got up and helped her out. He later apologized profusely for our fellow countryman and tipped the server well. Another life long lesson for my then 16 year old brain. There were many other times when I was older, typically on public transportation, where a fellow American traveler was talking about things they should not be, expecting that all around them was just as ignorant about foreign languages as they were, but I just ignored them.
But it's not always the Americans that are ugly. When I was 17 I was an Au Pair in France for 15 months. I joined Mom and Dad for a week in Paris when they brought a group of my classmates from high school, (I graduated as a Junior,) on a class trip. Mom was the French teacher at my high school. I was hanging out with my American friends in the Montmartre neighborhood, admiring the sidewalk artists, and of course acting like the bunch of small town high school girls we were. Assuming none of us spoke French, or perhaps not caring, the artist made suggestive lewd comments to us in French. Momentarily stunned when I used my considerable by then language skills to slap him up the side of the face verbally for his rudeness, he seemed to decide it was a great opportunity that I spoke French and continued with his suggestions. In France, American women were considered then as French women were considered here...loose and easy. It was not the first time I dealt with that in my time there, and I had learned to choose to accept that peculiarity as a strange unwanted compliment, but frankly it happened enough in their 7 day stay to my friends as well that they mentioned it as an issue when I asked then how they liked France. The inappropriate attention was not always verbal, and I learned to be very careful about being in a group when out and about. I tried to liken it to going to NYC and having construction workers yell inappropriate things across the street as you passed by, (a VERY creepy experience of mine at 16,) but this was a thing in small town France as well. And no, it wasn't because of the way we were dressed, but because they heard us speak American. The British Au Pair I sometimes hung out with did not experience the same issue, nor did my French friends who were dressed much more provocatively than I. I confess it was not only in France that I experienced this issue, (having done all of my literal face slapping in Europe,) but I suspect I should no longer have that problem today, 45 years later. :-)
Cultural differences, (and Mediterranean men,) can be tricky.
IP,
sadly with several other examples of the above, starting at 12 in Greece
No. of Recommendations: 0
"But this is REAL money"
This is a funny story. I would have spoken up "not in this country!". Of course, that's 60+ year old me. In the 70s, I was a teen. Didn't have much of a clue back then.
